City Ruins performance

[bodkin]

My specs are:

E6600 dual core cpu

7900GS gpu

3 mb ram

but I find the scenario 'City Ruins' really chugs along at a pathetic frame rate.

Has anyone else played this scenario on a similar rig and got decent performance. I use 'improved' for both the texture and model qualities and high priority process 'off'.

This scenario has alot of buildings on the map so I'm wondering what settings might improve the frame rate, I'm still using 162.18 drivers.

[Pandur]

same scenario

+E6400 dual core

+2gb

+7950GT

-------------

=unplayable.

i tried to reduce houses where they arent needed, i removed flavour objects en mass, removed trenches to a resonable amount so you can still use em but they arent everywhere. still no go, its much better but no go for me.

i never started a turn becouse it allready slugs around in "pause".

it would look awsome to play, i would really like to try it but there is a line at some point.

i strongly suspect it to be the fact that i have 2 x 2.13 Ghz but can just use 1 x 2.13Ghz.

you saw the screen Other Means provided in the "New PC Advice needed" thread.

EDIT:

to add, unit whise you have a company or bit more so, so its nowhere near "big"

also, i have "balanced" sttings in both.

[handihoc]

Yep, the slowdown problem is being discussed currently in another thread, and seems to be due to dual core/Core 2 Duo machines for some reason being unable to handle things that in theory they should have no trouble with. I have the same problem with an E6600 system - and not only on BF games.

Just have to hope that Battlefront can address the issue at some not too distant point. There's no real reason for it to happen, far as I can tell, except that the code isn't yet properly optimized for multi-core systems. How difficult it is to fix is something I'm not qualified to answer, but presumably it's not easy or it would have been done already.

[Cpl Steiner]

handihoc,

Didn't BFC try to do this already with one of the patches and then admit defeat due to a compiler problem. They switched compilers to generate machine code that used multi-core processors properly but the compiler was buggy IIRC.

[handihoc]

You may be right, but whether it's a matter of 'will never be fixed' or 'may be fixed if we can set enough time aside' I don't know. Just hope it's the latter.

Maybe BF could comment on this?

[Gryphon]

I wonder by how much the performance would increase, would this game actually start using the second core.

For a game like supreme commander the difference between using a single or multi core processor was phenomenal. I can imagine SF really benefiting from this as well.

If SF already uses multiple cores then i'm afraid things look bleak, but i don't think it does, does it?

[Gryphon]

Bump, anyone else having trouble with performance in SF? I'm playing the game in 1024x786 and it's still very slow when i look around.

Also when there is a lot of "sounds" going on, the game grinds down to a halt. During more intense firefights it slows down big time.

[missinginreality]

Yes at times I notice significant slow down periods; specifically I can remember the campaign abandoned airfield map - had artillery, a few smoking vehicles and a big firefight going on and the MG rounds were sounding every second or so on WEGO and the clock was running about half speed.

Running Intel Centrino Duo T7100 1.8 Ghz

2Gb RM

Vista Home Premium

Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS Driver 7.15.11.134 22/05/07

[Bluto]

I see the same thing, game pauses, terrain continually redraws. Started seeing this in 1.06 and 1.07.

[SlapHappy]

I just did a test using City Ruins. I was getting 12 FPS on the initial startup screen using 2.6 GHZ setting on my q6600 quad core. That's a very slight overclock. So I pushed down to 1.8 GHZ and got 8 FPS...a 50% decrease! Then I thought perhaps it wasn't actually a 50% decrease as much as a 4 FPS drop.

So I loaded a much smaller mission (my modified Al Haqf) using 2.6 GHZ again. 42 FPS on startup screen. Dropped to 1.8 GHZ again and 21-25 FPS. Another 50% decrease.

So in my test an 800 MHZ speed drop equaled a 50% performance drop.

Of course, there is no guarantee that shifting clock speed upward will give the same performance ratio. In fact, it's probably somewhat likely that the CPU speed/FPS ratio is not linear but probably curved with additional CPU clocks giving lesser ratio gains......

But, who knows? My B stepping CPU doesn't like to overclock too much. Some say the better G0 stepped chips can get up to 3.6 GHZ on air cooling.

[bodkin]

It's a problem for gamers in general I think, for the last year most people bought multi-core CPU machines only to find performance was not as good as what they expected in light of the reviews of the the multi-cores.

But the problem remains that game developers are not utilising the full potential of the multi-cores by having their code only run on one core. This is quickly changing, but I guess to maximise their market the devs want to make it accessible to the most players at the moment.

Then again I'm no expert on hardware but I'm thinking by optimising the code for multi core CPU's those with older single cores will be left out.

I suspect CM:Normandy might follow the current trend and better use the new CPU's, considering their forward looking approach to the engine.